


Calypso

by neifile7



Series: Landfall [3]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Backstory, Character Death, Crossdressing, Dubious Consent, Historical Characters - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Multi, Public Sex, References to Prostitution, Victorian era, Violence, relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2017-12-31 00:22:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neifile7/pseuds/neifile7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happened to Jack between the Game Station and his discovery by Torchwood thirty years later? How did he discover his immortality? A look at the career of a stranded time traveler in the Victorian era. Pre-S1, pre Jack/Ianto (but relevant to the later relationship).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [51stCenturyFox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/51stCenturyFox/gifts), [copperbadge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperbadge/gifts), [thaddeusfavour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thaddeusfavour/gifts).



> First published on LJ on 9/21/09. 
> 
> Beta by pogrebin and 51stCenturyFox (to whom the first two chapters are dedicated). Four years later, I'm still infinitely grateful.

Then I bound both the keel and the mast together 

Seated on them, I was carried by the destructive winds. 

Nine days I was borne thence, and on the tenth night 

The gods brought me near the island of Ogygia, where lives 

Fair-braided Calypso, dread god with a singing voice. 

She befriended me and cared for me. 

\-- Homer, Odyssey, Book V 

 

I.  

Jack can almost taste the tang of this morning as he ambles across the Plass: the slanting sparkle on the Bay, the in-blown salty breeze that's bellying his coat about his calves. A billowing smear on the horizon foretells the usual piss-rain later, but the moment's brightness is worth savouring, worth even a few minutes delay en route to Ianto's coffee.

 

It helps that he's had quite a satisfactory night: Suzie, bless her twisty workaholic soul, has a new artefact to play with, and graciously took over the Rift watch after their long Weevil hunt the previous evening.  So Jack had been free to pursue what for him is the best coda to a good adrenaline rush, in the form of a handsome Swedish sailor with an uncertain grasp of English and a far surer grasp of what to do with his cock.  He hadn't minded (or understood, probably) Jack's inter-orgasm rambling, hadn't objected to several of his more inventive gambits, hadn't done more than smile sleepily when Jack kissed him and made a quiet exit a half hour before.  

 

Two figures leaning on the railings overlooking the Bay glance up as Jack strolls near: Ianto and Owen, an odd pair at any time, unexpectedly crowned by plumes of smoke as they idly draw on their cigarettes.  Ianto, as usual, has the look of a bandbox mannequin, even with his arms folded and eyes slightly scrunched against the smoke.  Owen, slouched against the rail in yesterday's clothes, eyes Jack briefly, then gestures with his deathstick to illustrate whatever point he's been making.  

 

"-- so she finishes telling me what she wants to do to me, pretty good wind-up I have to say, and then she says, 'Of course, that bit costs extra.'  Little bitch is a tart after all, and in a place like that, too. Never paid for it in my life, not about to start, thank you very much."

 

Ianto snags Jack's glance in a rare and frankly treasured moment of complicity before casting his eyes up slightly.  Jack takes in Owen's showered but still-dishevelled appearance, sees a reflection of his own well-shagged state and catches a whiff of familiar perfume under the smoke.  Ah.  Suzie's had company after all.  This is a bit of post-coital indulgence in the guise of a little male bonding, nothing more.  

 

"I mean, I suppose the working girls have to make a living too, but it's pretty grotty if you ask me, having slags like that in the best hotel bar in town," and Owen's voice ratchets up a bit as he puffs aggressively on his fag.  

 

Sometimes there's no accounting for Suzie's tastes.  

 

"The real mystery, Owen,"  Jack says without thinking, "is how you ever managed to get laid  _without_  paying for it."  

 

Careless words, like a random incantation ( _speak, memory_ ): for a moment the scene fades from his eyes, and he stares out over the Bay as he first saw it a hundred and forty years earlier.    

 

Maybe it's the smell of tobacco, or the seagulls' chatter, the quickly-fading image of the Swedish boy's bound hands.  Maybe it's an echo of something he once read by a dreamy and narcissistic young Frenchman he'd dated a couple of lifetimes ago.  It's a wash of recollection as insistent as the oily water slapping and sucking at the pilings below, and Jack turns abruptly, heads into the Tourist Centre almost blindly, ignoring Owen's gape and Ianto's narrowed eyes.  

 

Only when he's seated at his desk, hand absently splayed over the coral, does he feel himself break the surface again, grasping about for a coil to free him from the undertow of memory, and failing.

 

II.  

1869-70 

Cold, first, then hands and knees scraping a rough surface dusted with something that looks like snow but smells a lot nastier.  He's still heaving, head hanging at a stupid angle because it's too much trouble to pull it up and take in his surroundings. It's never been like that before.  The tunnel sensation when he's just about to hit the target time -- yeah, that had gone as usual, until he'd felt an almighty buffet in the Vortex, like some object accelerating rapidly past him, and it had punched him ass-over-teakettle before sucking him right into its whirlpooling wake, a fast funnelled eddy to -- here.  

 

Shit. He shoves himself to a half-sitting position groggily, head swimming.  Dark, semi-enclosed space.  Alley of some kind, with gas lamps at either end -- pretty archaic-looking for the twentieth century.  Barely enough light to see his wrist-strap.  

 

It's dead; absolutely unresponsive to his repeated punching, refusing to reset.  Nothing.   _Fuck_.  

 

He gets to his feet unsteadily and staggers down the alley toward the street.  Definitely snowing a bit, and there's some kind of glow in the sky to his right, an unnatural light for this time of night, and an almighty stink of gas.  He hears a faint roar of flame and then loud voices, a distant commotion of feet and bells.   

 

Narrow streets, lined wall-to-wall with houses of two or three storeys, and this doesn't look anything like the Cardiff he remembers.  He can barely stand upright, the Vortex nausea's so bad, and dammit, his stabiliser meds are back in the TARDIS.  He hasn't had time sickness for years now, and he can't ever remember it being this vicious, the acid rising up in his throat and the rubbery legs, the dizziness that's getting worse with each step.  And it's so fucking cold.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Cover, he thinks hazily.  First Time Agent rule, wherever, whenever.  Get yourself some cover.  The idea of getting closer to a fire has some appeal, but yeah, wrong move to head straight for a disturbance under the circs. One foot ahead of the other, that's it, keep moving.  

 

More voices, down the first left turning.  Figures muffled head to foot, emerging from some sort of building with a squat spire -- ah, a church, he remembers those from the 1940s.  Laughter, and calls of "Merry Christmas!"  Most stroll away, but one or two are climbing into -- what? Some kind of conveyance.  Those are horses, by god.  Horse-drawn carriages.  He flattens himself alongside the buildings and edges closer, watching the stragglers pass, taking in the hoopskirts, the bowlers and bonnets, the heavy ulsters.   

 

The church door, as he draws alongside, is still open, gas lights and candles winking out one by one inside as a single figure moves along the pews.  He slips inside and hugs the recess inside the vestibule, drawing unsteady breaths as another wave of nausea threatens.  The -- what's he called? caretaker? sexton, that's it -- is nothing but a bobbing shadow bearing a lantern down one aisle.  

  
Jack hears another door opening, and nips up to the top of the aisle in time to see the sexton extinguish his lantern at the side-door and step out in the night.  More grinding bolts, and Jack is, apparently, locked in.  

 

At least it's warmer in here.  

 

Jack feels his way back down the aisle to the front door.  He locates a few gas jets and, after some fumbling, manages to turn them back on.  There's a notice board near the vestibule littered with "Parish News" circulars in what looks like English and Welsh -- this must be Cardiff, then; and, dead centre, a program for "Evening Service -- Christmas Eve."  Order of hymns, lesson, sermon, and "Prayers for HRH Queen Victoria and the Royal Family."  The date is 24 December 1869.  

 

He's off by a whole fucking century.  

 

A century, what's more, that he doesn't know  _at all_. Jack's wound up in the wrong place before, but never with this little kit and so poor a briefing.  Say "Victorian" to him and all he thinks of is a fat queen, a bloated Empire, a lot of long-winded novels, and a byword for sexual repression.  

 

Looks as though his run of bad luck isn't over yet.  

 

\-----  

Jack sleeps in an unlocked pew, wrapped in a tattered cloak he finds hanging in the vestry. He dreams he's back in the console room of the TARDIS: Rose, her eyes strangely alight, reaches toward him, her affection an electric warmth; the Doctor looks on cold and aloof, until his features shift and blur into those of a stranger.  He gasps awake, shivering and hard, and jerks off automatically, gritting his teeth and ignoring the sting in his eyes.   

 

Breakfast is one of his last ration bars scavenged from the Game Station, and a drink of stale water from the piscina.  The notice board tells him there will be a service at ten this morning, so he huddles behind the hanging vestments and waits for the sound of bolts opening. Sure enough, the sexton busies himself first with coals and broom in the nave, giving him a chance to slip out.  The snow's stopped.  Jack pulls the cloak around him tightly and edges along the street. 

 

He's not sure where to go, or why, but there's a sort of gravitational pull in his belly that moves him in one direction, and it's obvious that he's too conspicuous for these deserted streets and quiet houses.  He passes down one alley and smells pastry and meat cooking, sees a maid opening a door and pouring water in the drain.  The door doesn't quite shut, and he huddles below the adjoining sill, looking down into a kitchen.  He sees the maid pass into another room, and he nips in and steals two hand-pies conveniently cooling on a rack under the window.  

 

He keeps going.  A high-pitched, harsh cawing grows louder: seagulls.  The streets grow narrower, the buildings more rickety.  And abruptly, he finds himself in a crowd.  

 

Pie-sellers, chestnut-sellers, match-sellers, hawkers of shoelaces and bonnets, an olfactory cacophony of food smells, human smells, dung, tallow.  Men passing in some kind of uniform, with a certain roll to their walks, talking loudly; a public house with a crowd spilling into the narrow street, a high hum of voices and somewhere the scrape of a fiddle. Raggedly dressed children run up to him, jabbering incomprehensibly, and seated beggars raise their hands. Men in loose trousers and fezzes, heavily veiled women trailing behind them. Faces pigmented across the human spectrum, and a range of accents -- at least his speech won't be too out-of-place here. The details differ, but the general scene rings familiar to Jack, who has more than his share of experiences in pan-galactic bazaars and shantytowns and yes, ports of call.  

 

Cardiff is a port, after all, even on Christmas Day.    

 

He gets mostly passing glances here; conspicuous for his looks rather than his get-up, which is as it should be; his shoulders relax a fraction.  He lets the sensations wash over him as he strolls down this street, then passes through a narrower one.  He glimpses water at the end.  A few women standing in doorways call out softly as he passes, but he keeps going, as the buildings grow both larger and more widely spaced, and he finally arrives at a docking basin, a long set of wharves framing the view of open water somewhere beyond. 

 

He passes down the docks, and finally sees a straggling shingle beyond the warehouses. Nothing familiar in this shoreline, but here, unmistakably, is the curve of the Bay that he remembers from a sunny day on the Plass, one hundred and thirty-odd years into the future. He perches on a jetty, scanning the horizon, and eventually pulls his pies out of the cloak, chewing meditatively as he watches the seagulls wheel overhead, ignoring the growing numbness as the cold and wind pick up. 

 

The snow resumes falling just as he's reluctantly turning away from this first familiar sight of his landfall; ten steps back towards -- what? The mass of humanity a few hundred metres away? -- and a great gust blows in his face, accompanied by a buffet of dizziness.  He nearly doubles over with a sudden cramp, and spares a thought for whether the pies had dodgy meats in them.  It's a minute before he can walk further, and the snow begins falling faster, crusting up on his cloak.  Inadvisable to stay out here, but probably a worse idea to head back to the crowds when the Vortex nausea threatens.  He staggers along the bank, getting into the lee of the buildings -- warehouses of some kind, maybe, some with dim lights showing inside.  He tries a couple of doors and finds them locked.  Just as visibility really starts to close down, he spots some kind of ramshackle outbuilding and uses his last strength to batter open the flimsy door.  

 

It's a coal-shed of some sort, reeking of carbon.  No furniture of any kind and a beaten earth floor.  He sinks down and huddles, drawing the cloak tightly about him, and tries to keep the shivering at bay.  His face feels feverish but the rest of him is ice -- one part time-sickness, one part filthy weather, he thinks.  The wind grows louder and whistles through the cracks in the walls.  He rolls into a ball and hopes he can conserve enough body heat to wait this out.  

 

He doesn't remember falling asleep, but when he gasps awake, it's fully dark and he's unexpectedly warm.    

 

\-----  

It takes him three days to locate a watchmaker's, and even then he has to scope the place an extra day to work out the servant's opening and closing routine: Victorian shopholders, in the absence of electronic security, use human watchdogs.  But it's not hard to stroll in as the last shutters go up and overpower the fellow, knock him out with a minimum of violence and gag and truss him in the back.  Jack spends two hours opening and cleaning his wrist-strap, sweat freely running down his face under the lamps, and only manages to tease out the most obvious debris before he tosses it back on the counter, defeated.  

 

It's hopeless.  The tools, however fine of their kind, are still too crude for rejiggering the components.  It will be decades before silicon chips can replace the base electronics, and the nanotech that controls the manipulator is centuries away.  The jeweller's lens can't begin to give the magnification that will let him assess the real damage, and he has no idea how good microscopes are in this time -- assuming he can even find one.    

 

He glances around the shop.  He won't take the tools; no call to deprive the poor sod of his livelihood.  A little rummaging produces a fine gold watch-chain and some jeweler's wire.  He attaches the wrist-strap and his TARDIS key to the former, then uses the tools to loop a makeshift wire setting around his fragment of coral, affixing it to the chain like the charms he's seen some gentlemen sporting.  He tucks the whole into his pocket, and fastens the other end to the waistcoat.  

 

Time Agent Rule #2: protect your assets.  He wipes his face with his sleeve, and goes off in search of a drink.  

 

\-----  

He dreams of the Doctor and Rose almost every night.  

 

At least, he assumes it's the Doctor, because Rose is always there, and they're generally in danger.  Half the time it's the funny, ageless face he remembers so well, and the other half the stranger he'd seen in his first dream: wild hair, delicate features and slightly beady eyes.  The manic energy is always the same, though, and the running, though the pursuers shift around confusedly: a gigantic wolflike beast, a throng of goose-stepping metallic bodies, a sole menacing Dalek.  He tries to enter the dream to help them, to shield them, only to find that echo of Rose's affection, the Doctor's rejection, palpable as an invisible wall.  He never reaches their side.   And then he wakes, always with the  _why? what did I do?_  bubbling on his lips, a panicked sense of bereavement, and usually an aching, inconvenient erection.  

 

It's one reason he keeps on the move, however aimlessly; always hoping to wear himself down enough for dreamless sleep, aware that he's noisy when he wakes, and not wanting to draw attention.  Bad enough that cramps and nausea still hit without warning, all too often in public. 

 

He'd had a bit of luck on his third night: spotted a smart carriage drawn up in a narrow mews, the coachman drowsing on the box.  Child's play to overpower the fellow, knock him out and roll him inside, filching his heavy cloak and warm hat; then wait for the real catch, a drunken gentleman closer to his own size, whose trousers and waistcoat fit him well enough.  And the purse they contained, with a sovereign and some odd change in shillings and sixpences, has kept him fed and supplied a series of cheap tavern rooms where he can wash up and retreat a bit from the teeming streets. 

 

He keeps to this neighborhood for the most part, the narrow streets and closely-packed buildings near the Bute Docks that he learns to call Tiger Bay.  Clearly, this is where the tides of the world wash ashore, where seamen repair on their short leaves and where the immigrants huddle.   No one questions his accent or even his suspiciously cropped hair.  He can fit in well enough. 

 

He does venture restlessly toward the high streets now and then, and on one foray, glimpses a tattered theatre-notice on a wall -- just a fragment: "–rles Dickens, reading from his works, Empire Theatre, 24 December."  He stops, arrested by the date, and feels his belly tighten, a foretaste of realisation as bad as the cramp of time-sickness. 

 

A weird subterranean glow suffuses his dream that night: the Doctor and Rose trapped in a cellar, hands clasped, while shadowy presences swirl in the air and corpses advance upon them sluggishly.  A sweet-faced girl stands transfixed under an archway.  Then running from an explosion, and a vaguely-understood exchange between the Doctor and a melancholy bearded man, the TARDIS behind them in an alley. 

 

An alley, Jack thinks as he startles awake, that looks awfully familiar. 

 

It will take him almost two weeks to fully retrace his steps. 


	2. Chapter Two

  

Jack's trying for a quiet piss in a doorway of the dank mews, the half-foot lintel the only frigging shelter against the frigging rain that always seems to be splashing down in this frigging town.  He feels like crap, his legs only jelly-steady, but his head remains unfortunately clear, and he rests it a moment against the jamb while his urine trickles and splashes over the stones.  

 

He'd nursed an ale while plying Sneed with brandy, gradually coaxing out the whole story, the Gelth and Dickens and the Doctor and Rose and a poor unfortunate named Gwyneth.  It had helped that Sneed genuinely seemed to want to tell somebody who wasn't going to call for restraints and a hood, but the bleak import of the news -- how narrowly Jack had missed them -- had sunk in well before Jack had finished his drink.  He'd clapped Sneed on the back, wished him luck for the mortuary rebuilding, and gone off into the Cardiff night determined to get thoroughly drunk and find himself a fight or a fuck or both.  

 

He'd fetched up in a seamen's tavern in Tiger Bay, throwing back halfpenny shots of rum and idly checking out the talent -- not much to choose from on this winter's night, save a quarrelsome Norwegian sailor and a one-eyed Welsh toughie who looked as though they'd have a go at each other before long.  Jack allowed himself to fan his rage and adrenaline for a bit, stood with every intent of wading in and cracking their skulls together, only to discover that his legs wouldn't obey him.  No buzz from the alcohol to speak of, but the bile started creeping up his throat as he wavered, and it was all he could do to totter out the rear into the driving rain and air redolent of horse crap,  before he'd spewed the lot.  

 

Bloody, bloody time-sickness.   It's been four weeks now; he ought to be past the effects.  

 

He doesn't seem to be able to stop pissing, either, and feels foolish clutching his dick, especially as a light clip-clip on the stones alerts him to a feminine shadow entering the mews. There's just enough light for him to make out her face at five paces, all big eyes and mouth under a crop of dark curls and a once-jaunty hat. Slight figure, a few inches shorter than he, and her shawl, skirt and half-exposed petticoat look entirely too thin for this night's weather. She's smiling coyly as she sidles up to him.  

 

"Oh, sir," comes a breathy voice, with an accent he can't place.  "Beastly night, idn't it?  Could yeh do with a shillingworth of mouth music to warm yeh up, maybe?" That makes no sense to Jack, but the nature of the offer seems clear enough as she flicks her eyes up and down him, no doubt assessing his state of inebriation, and one hand snakes towards his open fly.  

 

"No thanks, miss," Jack mumbles, still resting his arms on the jamb.  "Not got a shilling to hand."  

 

"Such a pity," and now she slides up behind and runs one hand down his chest, the other flicking lightly over his exposed dick before curling on his hip. "Bad night to be caught out without.  Certain sure I can't help?"   

 

And there's a stab through his haze as he registers that she's got her hand on the watch-chain.  Which, as usual, is secured to the wrist-strap in his pocket.  

 

Adrenaline spikes through him and he summons enough of his earlier rage to grab her by the forearms and shove her hard into the doorway, pinning her with his hips.  He grinds his pelvis into hers once -- nice little bit of friction -- and leans down.  "Ah, no you don't, my pretty one," he hisses into her face, and she gasps, her eyes huge and, he imagines, dilated in fear.  

 

Except that with her hips flush to his, he can't help but notice a distinct and familiar swelling beginning to distend the front of the thin skirt.  He presses in again, insistent, eliciting another gasp and something akin to a moan.  

 

"Well, well," Jack smiles, teeth gritted slightly.  "So you're a girl with something extra, are you?"  He shoves hard and is rewarded with another moan.  "Like that, do you?"  

 

The huge eyes don't leave his.  The boy's breath whistles through his nostrils, and he slowly nods.  

 

"Not going to hurt you," Jack says, releasing one wrist and sliding his hand carefully under the skirt, shifting aside the petticoat.  He fumbles with the unfamiliar drawers and closes his hand over the boy's cock. Not so large, but nice and plump, and whatever the boy may be pretending, it's definitely interested in the current proceedings.  

 

Jack raises his hand and licks it carefully, eyes still on the boy, who makes no move to run off and whose chest continues to heave in a flattering manner.  Jack tugs the drawers down enough to free the cock fully and runs a few experimental fingers over it. "Good," he says, "so pretty, feels so good."   Fluid's already gathering at the tip, and he settles into a motion, up and over, rolling the foreskin a little and swiping his thumb over the head.  The boy begins moaning nonstop and canting his hips forward a little, and Jack lets himself rut a little into his thigh -- ah, that's good, delicious, and what a picture he's making here, the boy's hands flattening into the wall at his back and his mouth rounding into a succulent O.  He arches his neck a bit, eyelashes fluttering, and Jack licks at his pulse point before latching on hard with lips and teeth.  

 

It doesn't take long.  He's just a kid, after all, and Jack knows what he's doing.  The boy bites off a cry, pumps once weakly into Jack's fist before the come starts trickling over knuckles, and then slumps back bonelessly against the door.  

 

Jack's thinking he must have really gotten to him when the boy begins to slide down the door.  It takes a moment to realize that he's nuzzling at Jack's half-hard dick, and Jack stops him with a hand to his cheek.  

 

"Can't pay you.  Remember?"  he says gruffly.  

 

"'Sall right.  Want to anyway," the boy mumbles.  "Yeh smell good."  

 

Jack thinks hazily that he probably smells mostly of piss and puke just now, but supposes the pheromones are working their usual magic, and he's not about to object as a tongue snakes over his head and soft lips engulf him.  He's not had a proper suck since landing here, and oh, that's sweet, boy seems to know his way around...  

 

And then, an abrupt, violent cramp that all but doubles him over.  He jerks back, earning a shocked hiss and an inadvertent scrape of teeth, and with the intestinal pain that's enough to put paid to his erection.  He spins away, retching, and collapses a moment against the jamb.  "Was I doing it wrong?" the boy asks, and he sounds equal parts concerned and miffed at the implied slight upon his technique.  Jack slides up the jamb and fumbles his dick back into his trousers.  

 

"Not you," Jack grits out.  "Not at my best."  He breathes hard, waiting for the cramp to subside, and then pushes off to standing one-armed.  "Sorry about that," he mumbles.  He essays a couple of shaky steps away from the door, skids on the slick cobblestones, and goes down face first into straw and dung-flavored mud.  Oh,  _perfect_.  

 

"Mister, yeh all right?" says a voice near his ear, and the boy's crouching next to him and passing a ragged handkerchief over his face.  It smells disgustingly of cheap Parma water and come.  He tries, feebly, to heave himself to sitting and the boy catches him around the shoulders, hauls him upright.  He peers at Jack and wrinkles his forehead.  

 

"Look, mister, want me to find yeh a cab?  Walk yeh to yer lodging?"   

 

"Haven't got one," Jack grunts. It's true; he hadn't gotten farther than thinking he'd spend his last few coppers for a good sweat in a bathhouse.    

 

The boy hesitates, then visibly summons some resolve. "See here, mister," and he takes Jack's weight while steadily pulling him to his feet. "Can't stay out in this rain, yeh're not well.  I can take yeh somewhere, make a nice cuppa tea, get yeh cleaned up a bit.  It's not far.  Can yeh walk, sir?"  

 

"Call me Jack," he hears himself reply distantly through the buzz of vertigo as he tries to focus. It seems like a lot of gratitude for a simple handjob, but he's not in much of a position to complain.  And if the boy really wanted to roll him, he could have done it just now.  "Lead on, kid,"  he adds, swaying a little.  "What's your name?"  

 

"What, besides Mary Anne?"  the boy asks, his earlier cheekiness back.  His face crinkles into a wide and thoroughly boyish smile that belies the tag and all the feminine trappings.  He takes Jack's arm. "Morrie," he says.  "Me name's Morrie."  

 

\----

Jack's sense of direction isn't the best just now, but he notes vaguely that Morrie is pulling him towards the Bute Docks and the huddle of warehouses. They slip down an alley and fetch up at the rear of a more substantial house, built too close to the wharves for respectability and bearing the stigmata of decay: water stains, faded paint and a general air of neglect.  They climb a creaking external stair to the penultimate floor and enter a dusty hallway.  

 

"Usual offices down that way,"  Morrie murmurs, one finger to his lips as he fumbles out a set of keys and opens a door.    

 

Enough light spills in from the gaslit street to give a shadowy illumination. The room smells of cigar smoke and rot, the ceiling plaster chipped and the paper peeling in places.  There's a sparse jumble of furniture that assorts the heavy and the rickety: a largish bed, a wardrobe, two stools and a table.  Jack takes in the high ceiling and the substantial but oddly placed window, and deduces that this is a walled-off fragment of a larger apartment, something confirmed by the fireplace that Morrie steers him toward with a certain air of pride. A sole threadbare armchair stands in front of it, and Morrie eases him to sitting before going to the mantlepiece and taking down a tinder-box.  He heaps a few coals into the grate, lights them expertly, then fills a battered copper kettle from an earthenware jug and sets it on the hob.  Finally, he lights a tallow candle and places it back on the mantlepiece, tossing off his hat.  

 

Jack wills himself to relax into the chair, wills his head to stop throbbing.  It seems to help. Morrie turns back toward him, smiling, and unbuttons his jacket, sits down on one stool and eases off his boots.  He pulls a cheroot stump out of a pocket and lights it, leaning back with his legs splayed.  

 

Jack takes in how the firelight limns him, makes a nimbus of the wild curls in the smoke.  Morrie strikes him as much more alluring half-out of his feminine guise than he was playing a woman on the street.  There's a long moment of silence while they study each other.  

 

"So," Morrie says at last. "No lodging, yeh said, and no money neither.  How comes it that a fine gentleman such as yerself is puke-sick on the street of a dread Cardiff night?"  

 

Jack considers his answer (his cover story still being a work in progress), and settles for a measure of half-truth.  "I've been travelling," he says. "Got separated from my party.  Wound up here, and, well, I'm more or less stranded, waiting for news."   

 

"And the sickness?" Morrie asks.  Ah, of course; infection must have been a big killer in these days.  Kid's right to be wary.  

 

"Something happened," Jack mumbles.  "Not sure what.  I -- I got hurt, and they left me behind.  I really can't explain it any more than that, because I don't know." 

 

"Had a blow, lost a bit o'yer memory?" 

 

"Something like that," Jack says, relieved for an opening.  It's not altogether a lie, of course. 

 

He's prepared to go on in this vein, with details about thinking he must be American and ex-military, on the assumption that nobody here will know any different, but Morrie doesn't ask anything else, merely turns to the hob and busies himself with making tea.  Watching him, Jack ventures a question of his own.   

 

"Why'd you rescue me?  For all you know, I could be a killer or a thief.  You don't seem like the type to trust strangers, let alone bring them back to your digs."  

 

Morrie straightens and levels him a look.  "Trust me bowels in most matters.  I've seen yeh about, mind.  Yeh don't exactly fit in hereabouts, but yeh have the look of a man who's more lost than up to mischeef. And..." He hesitates, toys with the teapot.   

 

"Yeh didn't get the vapours nor try to whup me when yeh realized I warn't a woman.  Most do one or t'other.  But you...yeh tried to make me feel good.  As if yeh liked it.  Nobody's much troubled how a whore feels.  Most just want their bob's worth and be on their way."  He turns away abruptly, pours out the tea and hands Jack a crude pottery mug.  "'Sides," he adds more briskly.  "I might be looking for someone.  Got a line on a job o' work, and need a partner.  Something tells me yeh might be the man."   

 

Jack blows on his tea.  "I don't know that I'm for sale," he says cautiously. "What kind of work?"  

 

Morrie puffs energetically on his cheroot, flicks the ashes towards the fire.  "Yeh know Minnie's, down Hope Street way?"  

 

Jack is silent for a moment.  A month in Cardiff has done a good deal for his social geography, including all the marketplaces for human flesh.  He's caught whispers about Minnie's: by no means the most exclusive or expensive brothel in town, but notorious as the one that caters to the widest clientele and range of tastes.  "I've heard of it," he says.  

 

Morrie nods curtly.  "Used to work there a bit," he says. "Sarvicing the coal brokers and fat bankers. Minnie takes a big slice and it's not as though playin' the flute pays all so much to begin with.  The entarrrtainments she does, now, those pay well enough.  She offered me a chance, only it meant working with a fella I do not like at all at all.  Working closely, if you follow me meaning.  I told her no.  Said I'd find me own partner."   

 

Jack almost laughs out loud.  Well, it's not as though he hasn't done public sex before, but the idea of performing for Victorian worthies is somehow...absurd.  But also absurdly touching, coming from this weird youngster.  He's not sure if the kid's just naive or an extremely astute judge of character.  "How old are you, Morrie?" he asks.  

 

"One-and-twenty," Morrie answers quickly, and Jack subtracts a couple of years mentally.  

 

"And how long have you been at your game?"  

 

"Five six year, just about."  Dear god.  Don't they look after children in this place? 

 

"You're not Welsh, are you?"  Jack asks. 

 

Morrie snorts.  "Not hardly. Born in County Donegal.  Been here most o' me life, though."  Yet another bit of immigrant flotsam, Jack thinks, and wonders if that explains a life on the streets.    

  
"And you think I might be a good partner for you?"  Jack allows a little skepticism to leak into his voice, just to see what Morrie will say.  

 

"Don't know yet," Morrie answers calmly.  He folds his arms, drags on his cigar again.  "Depends, really, on how good you are, dunnit?"  

 

Jack lets all his teeth show in his smile.  "Oh, I'm good, all right."  He stands, pleased to find his legs steady and head clear, and strolls over to Morrie, reaching a hand down to cup his chin.  "Tell me," he says, summoning his most velvety growl. "You ever been fucked, Morrie?"  

 

"I sell me mouth.  Nothing else," Morrie says, meeting his eyes steadily.  His own look wary, but hold a clear challenge.  

 

"Not what I asked," Jack says, running his thumb over Morrie's lower lip.  The boy's breath catches, just slightly, and Jack takes that as sufficient permission to lean in and kiss him, tasting tea and cheap cigar as the mouth under his opens.  The bitterness does nothing to dampen the stirring of arousal.  

 

Strange that someone who sells sex should be plainly unused to kissing, but Morrie responds with adequate enthusiasm, although he pulls away fairly soon.  "All right," he breathes.  "Yeh mean buggery, don't yeh?  Yes, certain sure I've done that."  

 

"You like it?" Jack leans in for another kiss.  Morrie slides a hand into his hair this time, holds him there.  

 

"Not...so much," he mumbles. "Well.  Liked the idea of it better than the doing.  Hurts a bit yeh know."  

 

Jack nods.  "It can, yeah.  Helps if you've got some slick."  Morrie looks at him uncomprehending, and Jack says, "I'd like to show you, but I'm not doing it dry.  Got any oil here?"  

 

Morrie hesitates, then turns and fumbles on his nightstand -- littered with tiny, crude jars and sticks of greasepaint, Jack now sees -- and clutches a bottle of something yellow and viscous.    

  
He leaves on his petticoat and stockings as Jack opens him carefully, makes a choked, surprised sound at the first pressure of fingers on his prostate, and soon whimpers for more.  And Jack gives, and gives, and comes all too soon inside of him (it's been a while for him, too), withdraws and -- to Morrie's patent astonishment -- finishes him off with his mouth, swallowing the bitter come without batting an eyelid.  The candle soon gutters with a stink of tallow and smoke, and they remain on the bed, curled a bit around each other but not really touching.  Morrie's breathing eventually slows, evens out.  

 

Just when Jack thinks he's fallen asleep, his voice comes, a little gruffly.  "Stay here for a bit.  Til yeh find yer feet, anyway.  I'll have a word with Minnie, see what's what."  

 

"Fine," Jack says, and then he's drifting as well; and for once, has no dreams.  

 


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next two chapters are for thaddeusfavour, who shares my brain on all matters Jack.

I will try to find, on this journey, someone 

who has the recipe for honeycombs. 

 

I leave my home – there are no companions – 

and step aboard my father’s boat with this instruction: 

 

forget the stars. The cleated angle where the sky 

meets to form a roof is all you can rely on now. 

\-- Mary O'Malley, "Calypso"

 

IV.

1870 

Minnie isn't  _quite_  the caricature of a brothel madam, Jack thinks.  Aside from the rouge and the excess of trinkets studding her bodice, her get-up's no different than other middle-aged matrons he's seen on the streets. But Jack takes in the false front of curls, the dyed hair, the washerwoman's arms and the corroded steel in her eyes, and recognizes every black marketeer he's fenced with on a dozen or more planets.  He mentally fingers the blaster he's not carrying, and watches her carefully.  


  
"Glad Morrie's seen some sense, finally," she says.  "He's wasting his talent on the docks and it's much too rough for the likes of him.  And you're too pretty for that kind of outdoor trade yourself," she adds, eyes roving and measuring.  "I can use a fine fellow like you.  Seamen taught you anything about knots?" 

 

Jack is mildly taken aback, but agrees that yes, in Cardiff one does learn the ropes, so to speak. 

 

"Good.  Solid demand for that, never less than five shillings a go.  More with extras, of course.  Morrie's good with his mouth, isn't he?" 

 

"Quite," and Jack admires the scattershot approach that's obviously leading up to something while keeping him off balance. 

 

"And yourself?  Can you sing?  Give us a few bars for laughs." 

 

Jack obligingly warbles a stanza from "Oh Susannah," one of the few period-appropriate songs he can recall off the top of his head.  He does, in fact, possess a fine baritone. 

 

"Ah, American of course.  We'll have to teach you a few Irish tunes; please the seamen and toffs alike, they do.  Well.  You're a performer, I see. You're not troubled to show yourself off, I daresay." 

 

"Even I have my limits,"  Jack says, a little cautiously.  Morrie had insisted that the job didn't entail fucking or getting fucked by clients, and Jack doesn't quite know why he's squeamish about that, but he'd prefer to keep some matters out of the commercial arena.  For now. 

 

He figures that nothing this town can throw at him will come as a surprise, anyway.  But when Minnie baldly describes what she wants from them, blunt words shorn of all euphemism, even Jack's eyebrows go up. 

 

_Victorian repression my ass_ , he decides.  


\------ 

Minnie's inner parlour is quite large by Cardiff standards, but still feels intimate with its overstuffed sofas and candelabra.  The raised landing at one end makes a decent stage, draped with velvet curtains and ringed on the floor below with horsehair chairs and small tables.  The clientele drift in and settle to these, chatting and eyeing the resident talent lining the walls, male and female in every sort of costume and every degree of cross-dress.   

 

Women dressed as butlers and young men in maids' uniforms circulate discreetly, pouring champagne, lighting cigars.  Minnie surveys them and the custom appraisingly; discreet brushes will be tolerated, but outright groping is forbidden without advance payment.  Bertie and Dafydd, her enormous hired musclemen, stand in the shadows, awaiting her signal in the event of trouble.

 

The stage lamps are lit, illuminating a placard at one side: "The Captain and the Maid Moirag." The curtains part.  Piano music, only slightly jangling, quiets the hum of conversation.  


 

The set, such as it is, looks more like an extension of the drawing room than a boudoir: heavy brocade curtains, a wide sofa, several armchairs, the ornamental flourishes accompanied by a bright, lilting theme from the pianist.

 

"Moirag" prances onstage in her maid's uniform to a light skipping measure, letting the ribbons of her cap bounce fetchingly off her neck; her skirts are slightly looped up to reveal ankles and petticoats.  She passes her feather duster over the furnishings and leans over the wax flowers on the table, flashing a little preview of a smartly curved backside to the audience.  "The Captain" swaggers in to a loud bass motif, dressed in his travesty of a uniform.  He begins flirting in dumbshow, groping and leering a bit crudely; the pert maid answers him with several flicks of the duster that inch from his shoulders down to his crotch.

 

Inflamed at this cavalier treatment, the Captain rolls his eyes and wanders over to the false window, casually disengaging a gold tassel from the curtain.  He strolls back and, after re-seating himself on the sofa, makes a sudden grab for the maid flouncing past.  She resists, but flatteringly so, breast heaving; he distracts her with a lewd, tonguing kiss while -- oh! -- looping the tassel about her hands.  Dastardly fellow to take advantage of a poor maid so!

 

And then the Captain neatly turns her over his knee and draws up the petticoats, revealing the luscious arse in fine drawers of thinnest muslin, riding a bit up the crack; and delivers a smart series of slaps, punctuated by the staccato piano chords.  He caresses the buttocks lightly between each blow, controlled and even tender for all the lustful passion in his features -- the lips he's licking, the hungry eyes.

 

Moirag mimes surprise, pain, and above all, increasing arousal, arching her back and neck and letting her rouged lips fall open.

 

Now the Captain pulls her up so she sits facing the audience astride his legs, and delicately pulls up the front petticoats to expose the drawers again.

 

(Their costumes are cheap and look tawdry in ordinary light, but with this moment in mind, Minnie has spared no expense for the froth of undergarments: the moment when Moirag's cock, straining against the sheer muslin, goes on full public view.  A susurration runs around the room, not quite a gasp, faintly underscored by the pianist's arpeggios.)

 

The Captain peels the drawers down just enough to draw out the plump cock and balls.  Moirag lays her head back against his shoulder as he begins stroking, rocking in time to his movements and the crescendo of notes that, fortuitously, always rise to their climax just as the pretty maid does.  

 

The Captain allows the skirts to drop over the cock he's just milked to ecstasy, and plants a biting kiss on Moirag's neck.  She looks up at him gratefully, pursing her lips, and then slides off his lap, holding out her hands.  He releases the binding, lust on every line of his handsome face. She pulls him to standing, profile to the audience, before dropping to her knees before him.

 

Naughty Captain!  He wears no drawers, and his manhood impressively tents his trousers before Moirag unbuttons them.  She suckles the tip delicately and runs a finger up and down his shaft before working him, inch by inch, into her wide mouth.  Flourishes from the pianist as she hollows her cheeks, begins a graceful bobbing; it's the Captain's turn to throw back his head and rock his hips forward.

 

(They change it up a bit at this point sometimes, either to show off Morrie's deep-throating or his inventive use of hands; sometimes he swallows, throat rippling impressively, and sometimes draws off to let Jack come on his face or, better yet, his cinched and padded bodice.)

 

Appeased and fulfilled, the Captain tenderly strokes Moirag's cheek, and she leans her head against his thigh, eyes blissfully closed against the final trills and chords.

 

Tableau; curtain; applause.

 

Jack and Morrie repair backstage for a quick snort of brandy while they clean themselves up, put a few cold compresses on Morrie's smarting backside, and await the results from the front of house.  Morrie's popular enough to merit a discreet bidding for his services, and no more than two clients will earn the key to his room upstairs on any night. But as Minnie predicted, there's a solid demand for Jack's talents as well, and few evenings finish without his administering a binding, spanking or light whipping, and handjob -- five shillings his regular cut, more with the negotiated extras.  Jack has to hand it to Minnie; a future age would call her a marketing genius.  She's careful to ensure that neither performance nor after-services lose their novelty, which means they often pick up as much as twelve or fifteen shillings apiece for a few hours' work, repeated no more than twice weekly.

 

The waiting's the only time Jack ever sees Morrie nervous.  He'll fuss overlong with his lip-rouge, finger the tiny brass St. Patrick's medal that's his lucky piece.  When the bedroom cue finally comes, he'll grin with relief, kiss the medal, and wink at Jack cheekily before slipping upstairs. "Wish me luck, boyo."

 

"See you in hell," Jack responds.

 

They usually meet up later in the tiny room off the kitchen that serves as the staff bath, to wash off the night's emissions while trading battle stories and slanging off the clientele.  They saunter out at three in the morning or so, heading for one of the illegal chophouses on the back streets that stays open all night, and wash down their trotters and mustard with ale, followed by gin and a cigar for Morrie.  Sometimes it's near dawn by the time they stumble home.

  
Steady work, social effort, and sex seem to have dispelled the last of the time-sickness, and Jack thinks he's getting his head above water, except for the damn dreams (well, and Morrie's a bitch of a snorer).

\----- 

 

Morrie's preparation for working nights entails a lot of shaving, plucking and swearing, and Jack tends to leave him to it, especially once he starts relying on Minnie's barber for the more tedious parts.  Jack takes to roaming the city in the afternoons, getting a good feel for the streets of Tiger Bay and all their trades licit and illicit; spending a few pennies for his meals, bought off street vendors, and indulging in the occasional mug of ale at opening time.  He's supplemented his meager wardrobe from secondhand-clothes carts, acquired a decent razor, all without dipping too far into his growing cash reserve. Occasionally he drifts into the more respectable districts where pedestrians are a bit more suspect, to observe the worthies in carriage and on horseback, check out the progress of restoration on Cardiff Castle.

 

It's on one of his afternoon rambles that he passes a recently-painted door in St. Mary's Street and stops cold.  "Cardiff Free Library," the new lettering reads, and there's a notice informing the public that the rooms are open from three to nine in the evening, with some additional blather about the betterment of the working classes through literacy.  Jack stares, caught between two unreeling trains of thought. 

 

Time Agent Rule #3: know what you're getting into; the ass you save may be the universe's.  Jack shivers a little, remembering his recent dream of Reapers attacking a church, his Doctor and Rose trapped inside...he has no databases, no guide but his own observations and what he can carefully extract from Morrie.  And there's so goddam much he doesn't know about this time that he's flying blind.  Jack's never been much of a reader, but he believes in using shortcuts where he can, and this might just be one of them.   

 

And then...the word "Library" calls up an image of a carpeted, paneled room lined with shelves, a sofa where he and Rose would cuddle and giggle and trade stories.  The TARDIS had thousands of works in its own database, but the Doctor was also fond of books as objects, and preferred the room that housed them to any other.  Except the console room itself, of course. 

 

The Doctor, who was so proud of having met Charles Dickens here in Cardiff. 

 

Jack pushes his way inside. 

 

A few inquiries, and he's shown a catalogue; allowed to prowl the open shelves a bit.  Rather a depressing preponderance of tracts and current theology, but periodicals and newspapers too, and someone has recently donated a cache of novels -- Eliot and Trollope and Thackeray are the names he recognizes, and Dickens of course.  After a little thought, he puts down twopence for a sheaf of foolscap and some ink, and begins laboriously writing down every title he can remember from the TARDIS' shelves, checking against the catalogue as he goes. 

 

The faint beginning of a plan, and a goal: to read as many of the works as he can put his hands on. 


	4. Chapter Four

V. 

1870-72

A man of Jack's catholic experience tends to have a fairly broad definition of fucking.  When you've exchanged stimulation with species that have...unusual appendages and ways of using them for pleasure, just about anything humans do to get each other off ought to fall within the meaning of the act.  But Jack finds, a few weeks into his work at Minnie's, that he can hardly think of what he's doing as sex at all. 

 

With Morrie, well.  It's a close approximation, and they manage to ring enough changes on the act to keep it from getting boring; all they're really doing is hawking the better-paid service they'll provide above stairs.  It doesn't much resemble how they fuck in private, which he thinks is probably a good thing.  And it's even further from the occasional tumbling he does with Meret and Maudie, the laundresses who look after his clothes and give him good-natured ribbing when he slips away from Minnie's vigilance to the washing-room.  Fraternisation between fucking staff and service staff is not exactly encouraged. 

 

Jack understands it best with the seamen; he knows how it is when you're on leave in an unfamiliar port.  He rather looks forward to the noisy nights when he sings in the outer saloon and plays shill at the tables (Minnie's bread-and-butter operation, open to the more common class of clients).  Badly paid, in comparison, but useful for picking up card strategy and information, and he can be pretty much as loud and flirtatious as he pleases. And now and then there will be some fellow who drops out of the game early, nurses one drink for the better part of the evening, and  eyes the young men and women working the room while politely refusing all approaches.  Jack learns to spot who's not got the price of a full evening's entertainment, and how to make eye contact and conversation that will lead to a discreet and separate slipping away.  He has to be careful, because it's strictly against house policy and the others will rat him out given half a chance.  But he likes the thrill of cocking a snook at Minnie, and getting a little honest reciprocal action with no price tag.   
  


It's the private clients, the toffs, who baffle him.  Morrie says that most are married, and that seems to imply less action at home rather than more.  He gets that Minnie offers pleasures that are strictly off the domestic menu, for whatever reason (some strange idea about women not liking sex or finding it demeaning, well, okay, he's heard weirder excuses for kinks).  Apparently people here don't talk about sex much, even when half-dressed or half- _trussed_  in front of someone they're paying to make them feel good.  They prefer to negotiate privately with Minnie, who excels at reading between the lines and has no trouble spelling out their wishes for him.  And unless they've requested a line of dirty talk -- usually the most abusive, humiliating variety Jack can come up with -- they seem to prefer that he say as little as possible.  


  
Jack knows it's a service he's providing, nothing more, but his clients seem...ambivalent; as though the chance to slip out of their skins for a few minutes isn't even all that enjoyable, just a desperate, shameful relief.  One that, for some reason, they can't ask of any woman.  And the moment they get off, they're back to treating him as a kind of lower servant, one who might merit a couple of half-crowns for a tip but who certainly has no right to get off himself.  Unless they've requested he wank on their faces, of course. 

 

He'll spot some of those faces on the street occasionally; the eyes either meet his with impersonal blankness or slide hastily away.  He does acquire a couple of regulars, one of whom actually offers him a position as a valet.  He seems affronted and disbelieving at Jack's refusal, as if the coinage of respectability should outweigh the loss of earnings and autonomy.  Jack's figured out, pretty quickly, what a crappy life servants lead, and it seems a no-brainer to him -- especially since his would-be benefactor plainly expects continued bondage and spanking sessions as well as dressing and tea-time service, all for fifteen pounds a year.

 

This is why he can't think of what he's doing as sex. 

 

Jack's used to exploiting his looks. Veteran of scores of negotiations where sex greased the diplomatic wheels, oiled the waters troubled by stubborn pride, and not infrequently lubricated the sealed deal -- yeah, sex makes a good refresher during a long game, and an even better toast at its conclusion.  Such liquid analogies have no place in Cardiff's hard-cash markets, where every orgasm's a taxable commodity, and there's generally one partner being paid to take the short end of the pleasure stick.  Doesn't anyone with a decent income in this town fuck for  _fun_? 

 

\-------- 

Jack finds little difference between his life with Morrie and what he's done on half a dozen other planets.  A local ally willing to share bed and information -- well, that's familiar and pleasant enough; the work's not too onerous, really, and leaves him plenty of time to learn the city and its inhabitants, and give his afternoons to the library.  It's clear, though, that having a partner of any description is new territory for Morrie, and so it doesn't surprise Jack that he's occasionally edgy, defensive almost.  A good fuck usually dispels his fidgets, but not always. 

 

Tonight Morrie's returned from some unexplained errand to find Jack stretched on the bed with a tattered number from Chapman and Sons that he's scavenged from Minnie's parlour (the author's name, and the image of the river at the top, having caught his eye).  Morrie lights his cigar and unbuttons his jacket, throwing Jack a few exasperated looks (is it the candles? Morrie tends to cheeseparing over decent light and fuel, sometimes), and finally comes to stand at the bedside, arms crossed and puffing -- what Jack thinks of as his testy bantam look, made more charming and ridiculous by his half-feminine deshabille. 

 

"So tell me, Jack Harkness, what are yeh doing here anyway?" 

 

Jack knows that tone, and closes the magazine.  Morrie doesn't hold with multitasking during confrontations. 

 

"I told you," Jack says, mildly irritated.  "I'm waiting for news of the doctor I was traveling with, and his companion --" 

 

"Not what I mean," Morrie interrupts tersely.  "I mean what are yeh doing here, with me."  Jack gapes at him a little, because, well, he thinks this ought to be more or less self-explanatory, and damn awkward to dissect to the extent it isn't.  Morrie flicks an impatient finger at the magazine.  "Yeh're eddycated.  Could be making a respectable penny elsewhere, could yeh not?  Down on yer luck I can understand, but how comes it yeh're slumming with the likes of me and not getting a clark's post or suchlike?" 

 

Jack's been so concerned with concealing the knowledge that he shouldn't have, with trying to blend in enough, that the obvious has never occurred to him: in this milieu, literacy is a conspicuous and suspect privilege.  It's so basic a part of his equipment that he's never given it a second thought. And he glimpses, for the first time, what may be worrying Morrie in all this. 

 

"It suits me," he says.  "I don't want a lot of responsibility.  I sure as hell don't want to work sixty hours a week as some fat broker's drudge.  And like I said, I'm waiting.  I've got to keep an eye open for news, and I can't do that if I'm stuck in an office somewhere.  I don't mind the work, Morrie.  I like you.  Simple as that, really." 

 

"Will yeh go back to your doctor when he shows up?" 

 

"I don't know.  I hope so, yeah, but I can't be sure."  No need to go into his deep doubts on the subject of whether the Doctor will take him back.  Rose will want him, he's fairly certain, but cold disgust mars the Doctor's face in his dreams practically every night.  Morrie's probably heard him mumbling in his sleep, certainly noticed his panicked awakenings.  "Anyway, it might be years before he gets back here, so no need to worry about it for now.  I just gotta keep my eye out so I don't miss him, is all." 

 

Morrie nods, but still looks a bit dissatisfied.  Jack decides to go over to the offensive.  "What about you, Morrie?  You're a bright kid. Didn't you get any schooling?" 

 

Morrie barks out a short laugh.  "And how was I to do that when me mam dumped me on the parrrrish when I was nine year?  Not that I was ever so brave at it, mind yeh, though the priest tried his best.  Larned me letters, just, but haven't had so much call to use them, have I? Reckoning, now, I was always good at that, still am," he adds with a touch of pride.  

 

Jack is silent for a moment.  He and Morrie have had a few -- well, not disputes exactly, but somewhat tense discussions about money.  Jack's preferred to salt the bulk of his earnings away in his rooftop cache (Time Agent Rule #4: secure your line of exit, in case you have to leave in your socks), but he knows Morrie is banking most of his with Minnie.  He'd been incredulous, at first, until Morrie had confided, shyly, his hopes of having a little tobacconist's shop someday, "since I can't get me bread on me knees forever."  And apparently Minnie's willing to make an investment, provided he keeps his nose clean and shows himself capable.  "There's Johnny the newsagent, and Sioned the milliner, and Martin the haberdasher," he'd argued, "all Minnie's, all retired now from the trade and proper respectable."  The dream of joining their ranks, it seems, had lured him back to Minnie in the first place.

 

Jack finds, at times, that neither Morrie's native suspicion nor his impulsive bouts of trust are all that predictable.

 

"You'll need more than arithmetic if you're going to keep a shop," he says now.  "You'll have to keep records, unless you hire a clerk to do it for you, and you'll have to handle bills of lading and receipts and all that.  You gotta be able to read, Morrie.  We can practice, if you want.  You might even like it."  He gestures to his magazine.  "C'mon up here, and I'll read to you a bit, and you can follow along and try for yourself."  And as Morrie takes up position, leaning now against his shoulder, he re-opens Number Five of  _Our Mutual Friend_  and finds the passage:

 

_"'For I ain't, you must know,' said Betty, 'much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper.  You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper...'"_

 

Most nights they aren't working they'll sprawl half-dressed on the bed, and Morrie haltingly recites as Jack runs a finger down the page; and then Jack picks up the thread and reads to him in turn ( _"He do the Police in different voices."_ ).  Of all the strange experiences of this odd new life, Jack finds this perhaps the most satisfying: two veteran tarts working their way through the novels and newspapers of the day, whatever he can swipe from Minnie's or the fancier booksellers in town.  The benefit's not all one way, either; Jack gleans as much about this era from Morrie's reactions as he does from the cramped letterpress.  He supposes he has the Doctor to thank for this as well: take your lessons and your joy where you can.

 

Given his choice, Morrie will always pick a novel; and he likes Dickens best of all.

  

  
\-----

Morrie has several wordless ways of asking to be fucked.  They'll be lying side by side, either in the last guttering light of the candle or in the dark, and he'll reach quietly between Jack's legs, roll his balls gently.  Or his hand will creep over Jack's chest and pinch a nipple.  There's something almost shy about these gestures, their reticence a bit absurd in light of what they do publicly, but Jack understands. And he's happy to oblige; it's no hardship, after all.  He'll lick Morrie inside and out until he's moaning and then he'll give him as hard a ride as he wants.  They're not quiet about it, but the solidarity beneath it all remains unspoken.  Some things they won't sell. 

 

Or so Jack believes, until Morrie starts staying out evenings when they're not working together, and coming home in his workman's clothes at around three a.m..  He undresses quickly in the dark and pulls on a nightshirt before Jack can get a look at his body; he stops asking for any kind of sex at all.  And Jack realizes that Minnie's got him peddling his ass as well as his mouth and probably a whole lot more besides. 

 

It hurts his pride, just a little, that whatever he's taught Morrie is (probably) lining Minnie's ample coffers, and he hopes that Morrie's getting a decent slice of it, to make up for his bruised looks of a morning.  But he also understands that Minnie's trying to milk her profit while she can, and that Morrie, too, thinks that he's on borrowed time, racing the calendar against the loss of his looks, the loss of his novelty.  He's muttered a few choice words about Mimosa, the laudanum-eyed long-necked beauty who's Minnie's current darling and the new centerpiece of the evening entertainments.  Morrie will be a pretty man for some time to come, Jack thinks, but he's almost past his date on playing a convincing woman, and with new competition he's at a disadvantage.  He's either got to expand his repertoire or get out of the game altogether. 

 

But it worries him all the same, because every afternoon he runs across newspaper screeds about immorality and disease, and he can see that Morrie's running some risks here.  Some of Minnie's clients are real pieces of work, and even the kindliest aren't exempt from the venereal plagues of the day -- their usual routines thus far have protected them somewhat (and Jack has inborn immunity, but wants to set a good example).  He tries to talk to Morrie about protection; sheep's-intestine sheaths are hard to find but, in a port like this, hardly unknown.  Morrie responds with a snort of derision.  "And who's going to pay to play in a topcoat?  Not bloody likely.  No, I make 'em wash up good beforehand and clean meself well afters, and that's enough."   


  
Jack swallows his pride and goes to Minnie, offering to watch Morrie's back personally.  But they can't agree on when and how he should intervene, and it becomes clear that Morrie has taken on a couple of Minnie's regulars who pay handsomely for indulging a little brutality.  And while Minnie's hardly likely to allow any permanent damage, it's also clear that she's giving them some latitude, and that Morrie's agreed.  

 

Jack blows up, quite spectacularly, smashing a case full of Minnie's china ornaments in his first outburst; then storms through the brothel intent on hauling his little cocksucker home before he gets himself killed, giving Minnie the perfect excuse to set Bertie and Dafydd on him.   

 

He's lucky to get home without much damage himself.  Odd, though (always), how quickly he seems to recover from cracked ribs and bruises these days. 

 

It's three nights before he sees Morrie again.  He's lit a fire and two candles for decent reading light, in defiance of all economy, and is working his way through _The Origin of Species_  (bought not stolen, a gesture to the bravery of the bookseller for carrying it), when the door creaks open and Morrie all but falls through. 

 

He's in his woman's clothes again, a tangle of sodden petticoats and overskirt, and his face is all one bruise, lip split and eyesockets purpled.  Under the battered hat, his hair is matted with dried sweat and blood.  Jack makes a wordless sound, catching him as he stumbles and carrying him over to the bed.  He strips off the costume gently, silently tallying the contusions, the evidence of burns on thighs, anus and abdomen.  And then he busies himself with pouring water into the fireplace copper, and ripping up a shirt for bandages. 

 

Happily, it's a cold enough night for the basin on the sill to have frozen.  Jack had taken to leaving it out there after the first two times Morrie had returned with black eyes.  He alternates, now, between hot water for cleaning and ice for the worst of the swelling.  Through the puffy slits, Morrie eyes him silently. 

 

Finally, Jack sits back on his heels.  "Arsehole,"  he says, not without affection.  "You never know when to stop, do you?  And now you can't go back to work anyway.  I'd like to flay Minnie for this." 

 

"Didn't know," Morrie mumbles.  "Dafydd was minding Mimosa and Bertie was tossing a toff.  I just left." 

 

Jack refrains from commenting on the stupidity of leaving a tart without backup with a true sadist in the room.  It's entirely possible, of course, that Morrie's become disposable goods in Minnie's jaded eyes; or that this is her reprimand, both for Morrie and himself. "It's time you got out of the trade altogether, boyo," he says softly. 

 

Morrie rolls onto his hip with patent difficulty, but it's clear he needs to relieve the pressure on his backside.  He looks up at Jack through his long clotted lashes.  "Goes for you too, me friend.  Minnie's not best pleased with yeh.  Given yer description to the police, she has. Get out of town for a spell, I say.  London or Paris, like you're always going on about."  Speaking is obviously painful, and he rasps harshly before continuing.  "Yer ship's doctor's not showing up, yeh know.  Likes of us, they don't remember.  Take yer bit and go.  I'll be all right." 

 


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next two chapters are for copperbadge, who shares my love of a certain city's history.

Calypso, Chapter Three, Part I 

 

He has gone, 

he has forgotten; 

he took my lute and my shell of crystal— 

he never looked back— 

\-- H. D., "Calypso Speaks" 

 

VI.  

1872-79 

Jack does go.  He knows Morrie is right; he'd lost his chance in 1869, and the Doctor isn't coming back anytime soon.  All he has to go on is the slim thread of his memories, of the readings he's done, the attempt, however quixotic, to follow the Doctor's curiosity and interests as they might bring him to explore this strange century.  It's the longest of long shots, but as Jack tries to convince himself, it surely means, if -- once -- they meet again, he can at least pay his passage with the stories he's collected, of people and events that the Doctor considers worth his attention.  

 

So there are some he seeks out.  He attends the ailing Darwin's rare lectures at learned societies, and is proud to shake the master's hand.  He's never given a fart for art, but he checks out a few exhibitions to get alongside John Ruskin (strange guy,  _weird_  about women, never got why the Doctor had all his books) -- who greets him with the zeal of a missionary, drags him to Oxford to meet his pal Charley Dodgson, pulls him around to the studios of his pet painters.  A man with few inhibitions can find other ways besides the obvious to peddle his flesh; modeling for Holman Hunt and Ruskin's nemesis Millais ekes out his precarious income, from card-sharping and sponging off the informal clubs and salons that always have use for a handsome, seasoned man.  It's in Ruskin's circle that he eventually meets a flamboyant, aptly-named Irish writer, flatteringly intrigued by Jack's river-crossing between respectability and demi-monde and his appetite for feasting with panthers. 

 

When these hypocritical fleshpots begin to pall, he drifts across the channel to Paris, awash in the bright lights and wide boulevards of a newly-rebuilt capital, awash in a positive deluge of sex.  His letters of introduction secure the interest of Manet (well, he can't  _help_  it that all these painters drool over him) through whom he meets the firebrand Émile Zola -- more names crossed off the list; but he prefers the company of a melancholy, bereaved writer whose flat-footed prose belies his ecstatic visions, journeys to the moon and the earth's core and deep under the sea.  The distinction between drawing-room and theatre, between salon and brothel grows less distinct as he pursues the will-o'-the-waves and, over time, finds the shoreline of his purpose fading from view. 

 

The dreams stop when he leaves Cardiff.  There'd been times when he'd have given anything to be free of that nightly torture, the shaking and panic of his wakings; but now he feels an equal despair at the fading image of Rose, of the Doctor he knew and the Doctor with the strange face.  He'd welcome even their disdain to see them clearly again in his mind's eye. 

 

When he enlists for the first time, it's simply that he's tired.  Tired of reinventing his cover stories, scrambling and gambling to keep his purse from anorexia, and being all things to all comers.  Whoring had been easy by comparison.  Ready-made routines, ready-made relationships, drill and discipline and acquiring competence with current weaponry -- these come as a relief, at first, and at least he doesn't have to think so goddamn much.

 

But always, eventually, the itching in his stomach gets the better of him, and he returns to Cardiff.  

 

\----  

1875 

He'd debated looking for Morrie the first time back, simply because he'd been afraid of what he might find. He actually passes the new block of houses and shops at the end of St. Mary's Street three times on as many days before he spots a familiar figure (to be honest, a familiar ass) leaning over jars in a bow-fronted window.  It's a tiny shopfront, but framed by a handsome doorway, smart gilt lettering on the hanging sign: "O'Donnell, Fine Pipes and Tobaccos." A bell chimes cheerfully as he pushes inside.  

 

Morrie straightens and stares.  He's spruce in his sober black jacket and tidy mustache, his curls well-barbered and his shoes gleaming, but his eyes flare with something of their old spark.  He smiles widely in the way Jack remembers so well, then reins it in a bit as he comes forward and offers his hand.  "Mr. Harkness.  Pleasure to see yeh in Cardiff once more," and Jack's about to tease him on the formality when Morrie jerks his chin towards the back of the shop, where Jack discerns a young man unpacking pipes from a crate.   

 

"Albert, me boy.  I believe that Mr. Harkness would appreciate a sight of the new panatellas.  Do look them out for him," and the young man gives Jack a curious stare before passing through a curtain behind the counter.  Morrie immediately steps into his place and retrieves a set of familiar keys from under the till.  He slides them silently across the gleaming mahogany, raising one finger to his lips.

  
Jack buys two cigars that he won't smoke, but he understands they're for Morrie anyway.    

 

The old house looks more derelict than ever, and it's plain that few if any tenants linger.  The porter's room is locked and the stairs show few footprints in the dust.  But someone's cleaned the old room recently, left a pile of rough bedding and towels along with a hod of coals, and all Jack really needs to do is open the window to dispel the stink of old cigars and the faint undertones of rot.  He discovers his old stack of books in the bedside cabinet, and after making up the bed, stretches out with a volume of  _Great Expectations_.  

 

It's well past dark and he's lit two candles when he hears the key in the lock, and Morrie slips in.  They look at each other for a long moment, and Jack takes in how Morrie's filled out, how beautifully he's matured.  And he's crossing the room before he knows it and kissing him.  

 

What follows comes as unexpected comfort in its easy familiarity, no guarding of his tongue in any direction.  How long has it been since he's come _back_ to something, found any anchorage between one moment and the next?  He can tell it's been awhile for Morrie, too; that, and the changes in his body, give the familiar a pleasing edge of novelty.  Afterwards, Jack props himself on one elbow, grazes fingers over Morrie's chest, decides he likes the dusting of hair along ribs and oxters.  The scent of bay rum that's replaced the Parma water is a decided improvement.  

 

"So," Jack says.  "Business flourishing, then?"  

 

Morrie stretches both arms over his head.  "Cannot complain at all at all. Forty pound clear profit in this last quarter alone, that's something.  The address, now, that helps, right crossroads between the high streets and Tiger Bay.  Get all kinds of customers, we do."  

 

"Any of your old ones?"  Jack asks, because he's genuinely curious.  

 

Morrie snorts. "'Course.  Not so many toffs in town if it comes to that.  And before yeh ask, no, they don't recognise me, mostly.  'Snot as though they ever looked at me face much anyway, and as yeh can see, I've changed a wee bit since.  If they do remember, well, 'tisn't like we're sitting down to trade old tales among the teacups, is it? We shan't call each other out."  

 

Jack mulls this a bit; he's learned enough to know that Morrie's made a nigh-impossible jump in social standing, and it hardly seems as though it could have been as easy as all that.  "You know, I'm kinda surprised that Minnie kept her word to you after all," he says finally.  

 

Morrie hitches himself off the bed, strolls over to the mantelpiece.  He digs a cigar clipper out of his trousers, and sets about the elaborate ritual of trimming one of the Cubans Jack bought. Around his first puff, he fixes Jack with a hard stare.  "Minnie's a businesswoman, first and last. She doesn't want to run a disorrrrderly house forever.  And if she wants a rrrrespectable old age, she'll need some rrrrespectable business folk to pension her."  At the exaggerated brogue, long a code of self-mockery between them, Jack laughs outright.  "'Struth. She's got a dozen or more of us, all giving her shares of our profits.  She bought me leasehold and 'course I supply all her tobacco. She's got prrroperties from here to Penarth and consolidated funns and before yeh know it, she'll be subscribing to almshouses and hospitals and be a right pillar of her parish.  That's the way of it in this town.  Coal money, whore money, all of it darrrty and there's ways tried and true to wash it clean."  He exhales a great aromatic cloud.  "And you, Jack Harkness?  Just passing the time o' day, are yeh, or did yeh have plans to turn an honest penny in these parts?"  

 

Jack smiles, all teeth on view.  "You know me, Morrie.  Honest work's never been my strong suit.  I'll have to have a look around."  He hesitates.  "I can pay you for the room, if you like." 

 

Morrie waves the cigar at him.  "Eh, don't trouble yerself.  If yeh're making the rounds, take note of what people are smoking and let me know, that's payment enough.  Don't get out enough to do it meself."  He strolls over to the armchair and begins pulling on his clothes, cigar between his teeth. 

 

"Not staying?" 

 

"Become an early riser, I have," Morrie drawls, shrugging into his shirt.  "Hard work, early nights, 'tis the tax o'clean living.  'Sides, I go to Mass most mornings before opening," he adds casually, doing up his trousers, then catching Jack's raised eyebrow. "Ah, don't yeh look like that. 'Tis the done thing for a rrrrising young man o' business.  Specially an Irish one."  He heads for the door, then stops, turns back with his hand on the knob. 

 

"Might be best if you're not about the shop too much.  Word to the wise.  Pretty much everybody comes in, Minnie hears about, and I'm not sure she's forgiven yeh her pretty bits o' Dresden.  I'll be about here when I can."  He mock salutes Jack, claps on his hat and strolls out, a gust from the doorway guttering the candle as he goes. 

 

\----- 

1879 

Jack gasps awake with a momentary surge of pain, and doesn't know where he is; then registers the light filtering through the gritty window, the familiar fireplace, the old armchair pulled up to the bedside.  Morrie is slumped asleep, hands loosely closed around the rosary in his lap, faint snores emerging. A basin and stack of dirty compresses sit on the bedstand, and as Jack sits up, another falls off his forehead. 

 

Memory seeps back, a hazy kaleidoscope of impressions: the crowded military transport ship from Gravesend, an outbreak of sickness on board that felled three soldiers before they'd even made it to the Severn.  Slipping overboard to evade quarantine -- bad miscalculation, he'd felt lead-heavy in the water -- then a feverish stumbling to Morrie's shop to retrieve the keys. Jack's not sure how he got here after that, just recalls a sensation of wading alone through streets whose air felt too thick, too liquid.  He vaguely remembers being sick in a gutter.  Illness of any kind, since his first bout of time-sickness, has passed him by -- advanced immunities, he's always supposed, and the edge conferred by Vortex travel.  Looks as though a few bugs can get around that after all. 

 

He feels fine, though; rested, for once (no dreams that he recalls), and no residual weakness from the fever. 

 

Morrie snorts awake, and frowns at him blearily. He raises a cautious hand to feel Jack's forehead, and Jack checks him by pulling back. 

 

"You shouldn't be here.  Whatever this was, it's pretty damn contagious."  

 

"Eh," Morrie mumbles. "Don't be daft.  Right bad yeh were at the shop last night.  Could hardly leave yeh like that, came as soon as I could."  He stretches a little and gets up, fetches the earthenware jug and pours them two tumblers of water.  "Found yeh slumped in the hallway, had a right job to haul yeh t' bed.  Muttering, yeh were, some kind of deleerium, bunch o' tosh about colours." 

 

"Colours?"  Jack asks blankly, accepting the tumbler. 

 

"'Rose,' yeh kept saying. Thought it were a name, but then yeh said 'Grey,' and 'It's blue.' So, reckoned it must be a vision yeh were having."  Morrie sips, eyes him solemnly. "Yeh called for yer doctor a few times too. Well, natural enough, being so poorly, but then yeh were in a right taking for a bit, something like what I've heard in a hymn once or twice, what was it?  Tarrr-des.  That's Latin, idn't it?" 

 

Jack gulps his water, throat suddenly dry.  "Just fever-talk, Morrie." He pauses. "Thanks for looking after me." 

 

Morrie, as usual, seems inclined to wave this off.  "Warn't much.  Put the cloths on yer face, just.  May have said a prayer or two.  For a bit there, looked like yeh might not be breathin' so well, but yeh went quiet-like, and I must have dropped off meself."  He pulls out the pocket-watch he's so proud of, and flips it open. 

 

"Should be getting back.  Certain sure yeh'll do?  I can have a look-in later, mind." 

 

"Really, Morrie, I'm fine.  Look after yourself, though.  Don't push your luck if you feel bad.  I'm grateful, I really am, but it wasn't sensible." 

 

Morrie laughs, gathers up his ulster and hat. "And yeh're a fine one to talk, Jack Harkness.  I've always had all the sense and the luck for the both o' us.  Well, a few Hail Marys don't hurt neither."  He winks cheekily and ambles out, leaving Jack to meditate on fine Celtic asses and strange Celtic philosophies. 

\---- 

 

1882 

"-- so there I am, all ready to console the widow, expecting someone just as dried-out and boring as the Colonel from all he'd said, and instead she's this gorgeous creature, good twenty years younger.  And I say my piece, convey the regimental condolences and all, and she just looks at me all steady, and then says, 'Well, we should drink to the dear departed,' and pours us a couple brandy tots.  And she gets this look  -- the glad eye if I've ever seen it -- and clinks my glass and says, 'Here's to the bloody old bastard, who finally did something right!'  and she tosses back like a man and crows, 'Six hundred a year!'  So, well, things just progressed from there."  

 

Morrie grins sightly across the tavern table, and raises his ale for a toast in turn.  "So will yeh make an honest woman of her, then?" 

 

"Not bloody likely.  No, she means to  _enjoy_  her widowhood, and I'm just the first handsome fellow to give her a hand with it.  So to speak. Suits me fine. 'Course, I mean to spoil her for anyone else who comes along," Jack says, smiling his widest and wickedest. 

 

Morrie hollows his cheeks around his cigar, exhales.  "Yeh niver do change, do yeh, Jack?" with a somewhat pointed look. 

 

Jack catches himself mid-laugh, pulls on his ale and his chin in acknowledgement of what's become a bit of a sore point between them. 

 

They've stopped fucking a while back.  Not something they've ever discussed, really, but at a certain point Morrie no longer silently slid the keys across the counter when Jack returned to Cardiff.  At any rate, the old house finally came down back in 1880 during the mysterious Mermaid Quay rebuilding, and Morrie's never been happy with Jack coming round the shop or his quarters above.  It matters less now that Jack's got Charlotte, who means regular bed and board and who is a touch more possessive than he really likes.  But Jack misses, well, being in the same boat as someone, navigating a common channel and a common cause -- that rare old sense of putting equal weight behind the oars. 

 

Minnie's final retirement from brothel-keeping two years ago, as well, coincided with a number of subtle shifts in Morrie's attitude toward him; there's been a distinct hint in the air, never quite stated, that he doesn't think Jack's really left whoring behind as any sensible body with options should. And Morrie keeps in close contact with Minnie, not just for business reasons, visits her weekly for Sunday tea; and from the way he talks about her, you'd think she was a much-loved auntie and not the spectacular tyrant of their brothel days. 

 

Jack knows that partnerships run their course, especially when one partner finds a secure anchorage somewhere and the other continues to drift.  He's been in and out of Cardiff, in and out of the military, and Morrie's settling into the comfortable ballast of his hard-scrabbled respectability.  But he's the one constant in Jack's life here, his first mate in every sense; and dammit, it matters that they understand each other. 

 

And Morrie has just reminded him of something that niggles at him, reminds him of why he's in Cardiff at all. Vortex travel can affect the aging process, speed it up or slow it down.  Jack knows he's got genes on his side as well, but it's a still a bit -- unsettling -- to see no signs whatever that he's growing older: no laugh lines, not a wrinkle or gray hair, no loss of tone from his impressive muscles.  He should be grateful, he supposes, since it's what most people would kill to have, but it's hardly worth it if Morrie or anyone else he cares for is going to look at him with that hint of repugnance, all too reminiscent of -- well. 

 

(He still dreams of the Doctor sometimes when he's in town here, and the line between real memory and nighttime vision has blurred over time, like a high-water mark that reshapes itself with each incoming tide.) 

 

They soon settle up their bill, and amble back toward the shop.  A wreathing fog shrouds the streets and creates haloes around the gas-lamps.  Their silences used to be more comfortable, Jack thinks, and fills the present gap with an outrageous story about cadet training, inept bastards who literally didn't know their arses from their bayonets and nearly sodomised each other with every rifle drill.   

 

And for a moment Morrie looks at him with his old, exasperated affection, and it seems the most natural thing in the world to curl a hand around his neck and draw him in for a kiss. 

 

Except that for the first time in memory, Morrie stiffens.  And not in the good way. 

 

But he disengages gently, for all that, and gives Jack a long look of mingled reproof and sorrow, and says only, "No, Jack me boyo, no," and slips off into the fog. 

  
\----  

1887 

Jack's sauntering near Sophia Gardens one autumn night, thinking vaguely about trolling for a blowjob -- policing of the grounds remains sketchy, with predictable results -- when his attention's caught by a figure loping through the trees; a semi-humanoid shape with an all-too-distinctive profile that he's never seen on Earth: sloping head and fanned gills above a full frock coat. The stigmata of those pan-galactic, hedonistic parasites he's encountered a handful of times, renowned for their ability to imitate local dress and speech and their gusto for petty crime and petty vices.  

 

Jack stops dead.  A fucking Blowfish.  Here in Cardiff.  

 

And he takes in, briefly, another figure stepping out of the copse and throwing a net, a shout and noises of struggle, then a brief pounding of running footsteps behind him.  But before he can turn, there's an efficient explosion across his eyes, one hard blow to the skull, and he goes down.  

 

\----  

"Ghosts and monsters,"  Morrie repeats.  "Here in Cardiff."  

 

Jack's slipped into the shop near closing time, the one hour that Morrie seems to tolerate the sight of him these days.  He's been distant for the past few years, demurring whenever Jack proposes a drink and a carouse.   And in general, his condition seems strange and abstracted, and altogether too aged for a man in his thirties. Jack will stop by and find him sitting glassy-eyed, cigar or rosary in hand, muttering to himself, and starting and shrinking if Jack lays a hand upon his arm.

  
Jack wonders what Morrie does for sex these days, or if he's simply substituted the vices that are telling on his body: the expanding paunch, the broken veins about the nose, the premature sprinkle of gray in his hair.  His eyes, slightly protuberant, show a mixture of familiar wariness and something new that looks a lot like fear.  It's a bad look on him.  His hands, Jack sees, tremble slightly and seem to be covered with some kind of rash.  He wonders if, irony of ironies, Morrie has to pay for his bed pleasures now, and if he still hankers after seamen and rough trade, or has learned to be a lover of women.  

 

"I must tell yeh, Jack Harkness, it's a right bad sign that yeh're even asking about this,"  Morrie says slowly.  

 

Jack starts to protest, and Morrie's raised finger cuts him off.  "No.  Yeh listen to me for once.  Look at you.  Seventeen year, just about, and yeh've niver changed an eyelash in all that time.  Not in yer looks, not in how yeh act.  'Snot natural, and it makes me think yeh've been fooling with matters that should consarn no decent soul.  Either yeh're a divil yerself, Jack Harkness, or yeh've been trafficking with the old gentleman.  Either way, I've done with pandering to yeh.  Sorry to say it, but it must be so."  

 

"Morrie, it's about my doctor, about how I'm gonna find him -- "  

 

"Yer doctor.  All this time yeh've been going on about him like he's the Angel Gabriel in his magic box.  Beelzebub's more like it, if he even exists at all.  No, Jack me boyo, I'm not falling for that old chestnut no more.  The police are right to run yeh out of town."  

 

Jack had awakened in a cell that morning, apparently scooped up by a police raid on Sophia Gardens; and he'd listened, incredulously, to a series of imputed charges ranging from theft to gross indecency to vagrancy -- all things that he  _has_  been guilty of, one way and another, but that he hardly expected to have laid at his door as the work of one frigging night.  He wonders, of course, about the figures he'd seen pursuing the Blowfish, wonders what they'd told the police to get him out of the way.  And then, he'd been offered a choice: stand trial or get out of town within twenty-four hours.  Not a choice at all, really, but given a real lead on alien presence here, he'd been desperate to follow through, to engage the help of his best ear to the ground.  Morrie's mulishness comes as an additional blow.  

 

And Morrie must see something stricken in his face, because he adds more softly.  "I'm sorry, Jack.  Truly I am.  Let me give yeh a loan o' five pound to ease yer way to London. Yeh can pay me back sometime, when yeh've mended yer ways enough to turn an honest day's work."  

 

And so Jack stows away on a tramp steamer bound for Gravesend that night, five pounds to the good, but in every other way, very much going from bad to worse.    

 

\----  

1888 

_"My dear Jack," his acquaintance murmurs as he slips into the seat opposite, barbs sheathed under the velvet and honey of his half-brogue.  "What has it been, ten years?  Yet here you are, delightfully if presumptuously unchanged.  Don't disappoint me by saying it's all down to a virtuous life."_

_"No such luck, Oscar.  I'm as unredeemed as ever," Jack says, trying gamely to make light of the literal truth._

_"I am relieved to hear it.  Although I do hope you haven't been so...unoriginal as to sell your soul to the devil instead."_

_"Funny you should say that.  It's just what another Irishman I know thinks.  Must be Celtic superstition."_

_"Jack, my boy. I have become half English; I am equal parts superstition and skepticism, and in all things an idolater of good form.  You both offend and fascinate me accordingly.  Now. Tell me of your misadventures, and I shall pay for your supper."_

__  
  
  


\---- 

1889 

Jack's standing on the Champ de Mars, gazing up at the Eiffel Tower, one arm each around Minette and Claudine, the two shopgirls he's chosen for this World's Fair outing, when it comes to him.  No dream this time, but an actual memory from his last days on the TARDIS: a chat just before the trip to Japan, pushed out of memory once everything went pear-shaped.  He feels a sudden, soaring buoyancy, and he laughingly pulls the girls along to the queue for the elevator.  His mood only improves with the expansive view from the observation deck, as if he's climbed to a crow's-nest after a long sea-haul and spotted land. 

 

Much later, when the girls are tangled round each other on his bed, murmuring sleepily in the half-light of his cheap rented room, he gets up and pads naked to his little desk, hauling out the old wad of foolscap.  He hasn't had much call for new entries in recent years, but now he locates a stub of pencil and begins writing on the backs of the yellowing sheets, trying to remember every nuance. 

 

_"How'd you learn American, Jack?"  Rose asks, idly toying with the holo-viewer remote.  "Was it just part of your disguise, or did you spend time there before we met?"_

_Jack launches into a complicated explanation of the origins of Galactic Standard and the near-religious significance attached to the Voyager probes by later generations.  "Well, of course it was the Americans who originated the idea of space colonisation," he adds, pausing to glance at the Doctor lounging in the library doorway._

_"Strange lot they were," the Doctor muses.  "Everything that was most admirable and most barbaric in humanity.  Arrogant apes, the most of them, ready to steamroll any species that got in their way -- but -- they did have a vision, of sorts."  He strolls in and leans against a bookshelf, arms folded.  "The World's Columbian Exposition," he adds inconsequentially._

_"What's that?" Rose asks faintly._

_"One of your World's Fairs in, oh, 1893.  Chicago had burned down twenty years earlier and come back from the ashes like the phoenix.  Built an imaginary city out of plaster and invited the entire world.  The White City, they called it, the biggest spectacle in their history.  First mass display of electricity, beautiful palaces imitating your Greek and Roman monuments, and a mingy side-show where the conquered peoples of the world were paraded like zoo animals.  Dedicated to progress and democracy, but stuffed full of everything that gave the lie to it all.  Also, if you like, the origin of reaching for the stars, and how you lot would act once you got there. "  He rummages the shelves a moment, pulls down an album and opens it: an early photograph of a vast, bombastic court lined with colonnades; a shot of a Ferris wheel; a huddle of huts and people dressed in furs, labeled "Eskimo village."_

_"Still, they had a point, y'know. If they could achieve that, the sky really wasn't the limit at all. You want to know what America is -- was -- that's what you should see.  You too, Jack," he adds. "Wouldn't hurt you to learn where you came from."_

_"Oh, we should go!"  Rose enthuses, clapping -- as ever, readily distracted by the multiplicity of choices.  The Doctor smiles, all indulgence._

_"Sushi first, remember?" he says gently.  "Chicago, maybe, the next time we think about going back to Earth."_

  
Jack scribbles, blackening his fingers, and sits back.  1893 isn't even four years away.  It's not too early to start planning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The afterword will include details and links concerning Jack's travels and the personages he seeks out. The anonymous Irish writer is, of course, Oscar Wilde, a great admirer of Ruskin (as who was not? the guy knew everybody, and introduced everybody to each other); the anonymous French one is Jules Verne. I'm still waiting for the Doctor Who ep that hooks him up with Twelve. :)


	6. Chapter Six

 VII.  

1892-96 

Accustomed to hard berths, bad smells and worse food, Jack still finds the Atlantic crossing a nightmarish three weeks, packed closely in steerage with a ragbag of Irish hopefuls whose speech reminds him none too pleasantly of Morrie.  But it gives him time to plan.  He'll go straight to Chicago, he thinks, maybe work on the Fair construction or get himself a job as night watchman, any excuse to be on the grounds all day and night and make his dispositions.  Oh, he'll be able to spot what will grab the Doctor's attention, all right, and what will enchant Rose the most; and he can't keep himself, in spite of everything, from daydreaming some reunion scenarios, sarcastic and tender by turns. 

 

They arrive at Ellis Island, and naturally everything goes immediately to shit. 

 

He wasn't even flirting, really, simply helping the pretty young Irish lass who was juggling her baby and a pitiful little trunk, and maybe it was just a little over the line to smooth out the shawl that kept hitching up around her neck, but how was he to know that her hot-headed husband would take it so badly?  He never even sees the pistol, just hears the shattering report and feels the sudden hollowness that knocks out his breath, knocks him to the floor, a kind of bubble of silence that keeps the screams just out of hearing range, as he watches the red spread over his shirt like a contaminated tide. 

 

The pain ebbs as his sight darkens.  And then -- he can't tell how quickly, time has stopped, has tunneled in a once-familiar-way -- it floods back, a full-body galvanic shock, and he gasps.  For a panicked moment, he's back on the Game Station, surrounded by piles of dust and stricken desolate by the tell-tale wheeze of departure -- 

 

The guard feeling his pulse drops his hand, shaking, his terror mirrored in a dozen faces crowding around. 

 

It takes two days to extract himself from police custody (he's apparently more of a danger than his would-be murderer, whose wailing and jim-jams made him the greater pain-in-the-ass in lockup).  He stops sleeping altogether and barely eats, gazing unseeing at the broad lakes and fields he crosses in the Chicago-bound train, his hand tightly closed over the precious fragment of coral on his watch-chain. 

 

He dies fifteen more times in America.   

 

Once during the fire that destroys the White City, makes a smoking heap of the plaster palaces and imperial dreams he's roamed fruitlessly for thirteen months.  The next day during the dregs of the Pullman Strike violence, after he'd taken refuge with a porter in the company town.  At that Jack decides to get out of Chicago, keep drifting west a while, because it's not as though it matters where he is any more, and chasing the vanishing frontier isn't crazier than any other form of self-reinvention.  He dies on a cattle raid in Montana, expires from starvation on on an ill-advised Sierra crossing, and slips off a cliff on the western slopes; contracts a virulent typhus in Death Valley and a bad case of gambler's revenge in San Francisco; tainted water in St. Louis, and a garroting on a boat crossing back to New York City that also relieves him of the little cash he'd accumulated. 

 

Each demise introduces him to a new circle of what's fast becoming his private hell.  Deaths by accident and stupidity; more deaths at the hands of jealous husbands and lovers; deaths that leave him the sole survivor of tempest, famine and pestilence -- Morrie would have something to say about the biblical reach of all that, he thinks.  Jack knows that the body doesn't, thankfully, recall pain for too long.  But he'd swear that however varied and excruciating the mode of each death, he always resurrects with one specific agony: the cauterising beam of the Dalek laser, dragging him head-first back into light.  

  
With every death, his sense of impotent rage grows.  Doctor, you have a lot to answer for. 

  
\----  
1897-8 

Jack can't face Cardiff again, not yet, not even as the tug in his belly grows with each mile steaming across the Atlantic.  He's booked his passage to Le Havre, second-class, and more or less automatically runs a couple of shipboard cons to cover the expenses to Paris.  He discovers that an old acquaintance has recently taken up self-imposed exile here, and decides to try "Sebastian Melmoth" for a bed and a few free meals.  At least he already knows his appearance won't raise too many eyebrows, either with his host or the Hotel d'Alsace.  

 

Oscar pounces on him with a glee born partly of boredom, Jack thinks, and partly of something else.  "Oh, I owe you a few favors," he says enigmatically, so Jack doesn't object as he's dragged to Oscar's favored haunts, the promenades, fleshpots and even a few dining-rooms and salons where he still sharpens his claws.  Reading Gaol has done little to mellow his acidity or his need for attention, and Jack's a plum to be shown off.  It's not long before others take notice.  

  
 

_"Your clothes pain me."_

_"Why? I look good like this," and Jack glances down at his old, half-unbuttoned uniform, frowns a bit at the fraying cuff._

_"I cannot take you anywhere dressed like that."_

_"Oh lord, spare me the lecture on drawing-room manners.  Your duchesses will manage fine without me."_

_"You seem to forget that we were first introduced in a drawing-room, mon ami."_

_"How about that blowjob in the Bois?  Seemed like a pretty solid introduction to me."  Jack lounges against the cushions, takes an experimental sip of champagne._

_"You know perfectly well what I mean."  A pause, then more softly, "It would matter less if you would let me install you here.  As I have begged you repeatedly to permit me to do."_

_"Under the same roof as your parents?  You're dreaming, Marcel."_

_"They would understand.  They know what it would mean for my peace of mind.  I am in such anxiety about you, mon cher, that I can accomplish nothing."_

_"Not like you're getting that much written anyway, with all the time you spend in drawing-rooms."_

_"You do nothing but treat me ill."  Petulance. As usual._

_Jack sits up, slides a hand along the other's collarbone.  "You like how I treat you just fine," he growls, hitting the feral note that turns Marcel into putty every time._

_"Ah, non, non, you must not distract me like that, Jacques...ah, je t'en prie, pas ainsi!"_

It ends badly.  It generally does, and Jack debates his next move, toys with the idea of enlisting again -- it would take some fast talking, given the bridges he's burned and the form he's acquired.  But it feels like he's putting off the inevitable, and the gnawing in his guts hasn't grown any the less with a few months of decent food and creature comforts.  A casual knifing under the Pont des Arts one evening, his first death since returning to Europe, reawakens the rage, the need for answers, the old helpless sense that he's looking in the wrong places, even if he can hardly bear the thought of the right one.  

 

And so he takes ship for Cardiff, early in 1898, his mood fouled and careless of consequences, and begins inventing his search all over again.  

 

\---  

He neither avoids nor seeks out Morrie's shop.  He does glance in when he passes down that street, but never spots Morrie behind the counter; it's always the frog-faced Albert or a younger woman with blonde curls whom he hasn't seen before.  After a few lonely weeks he breaks down and goes inside, meeting Albert's cool blankness at his inquiries.  Mr. O'Donnell is away.  Yes, he can take a message for Mr. O'Donnell, but can't rightly say when he'll be able to deliver it.  

 

Jack tries again another day when he spots the young woman alone: charms her into introducing herself, flirts and flatters quite shamelessly, but meets the same resistance, although Kitty has the grace to blush as she repeats the formula of denial.  Sensing a weak spot in the defences, Jack reconnoiters; manages to catch up with her as she leaves one evening for the shops, carries her basket and helps her pick her cabbages and potatoes.  But true to Morrie's usual form, Kitty's no fool.  

  
"It's no use, Mr. Harkness," she says firmly as they come back within sight of the shop.  "It is Mr. Harkness, isn't it?  Mr. O'Donnell's not to be seen, not by you.  Not by anyone, really, unless it's Mrs. Collyer-Lloyd.  The other proprietor," she adds, and it gives Jack a vague shock to recognize Minnie's full handle, probably a name as assumed as his own. "And I can't rightly tell you any more than that. I'm sorry."  

 

And so Jack gives it up for the time being.  He's busy, anyway.  Busy drinking himself stupid when he feels like it, because hey, no lasting consequences.  Busy falling into cheap beds and getting kicked out of them.  Busy sucking off the occasional sailor ( _shillingworth of mouth music to warm you up?_ ).  Busy running his small scams and card-sharping, haunting taverns, collecting his stories of strange doings in Cardiff, and letting his tongue run loose more often every month.  He figures he has little more to lose; there's always a chance that someone will tell him something. And if there's a grain of truth to any of the tales he's hearing, the Doctor's suturing of the Cardiff Rift has frayed to the splitting point.  Sooner or later, surely, he'll need to be back to change the bandages.   

 

It's on impulse that he stops by the shop one early winter's evening, spying Kitty among the jars in the bow-fronted window.  He thinks he'll offer her a drink, see if she'll give him any news, maybe ask her to take a letter to Morrie if she won't.  To his surprise, she takes his arm and guides him through the curtains to the back stairs.  

 

"It's a fine thing you came tonight," she confides as they climb. "He's having one of his better days," and she knocks on and opens a door. "Mr. Harkness to see Mr. O'Donnell," she announces formally before turning back downstairs.  

 

The light's low in here, a single lamp by the bedstead where the dour Albert looks up at him, then pointedly puts down his book, bound morocco with a cross stamped on the cover, and stands with clenched fists. "'Sall right, Albert," says a thin, rasping voice from the bed, and Jack gets a quick impression of waxy hands clutching a rosary and cavernous eyes.  "Yeh can leave us.  Well, Jack Harkness, you old divil. Was not expecting yeh at all at all."  

 

The door closes ungently behind Albert, and Jack comes closer.  Morrie's hair is a shock of tangled gray against the pillow, but otherwise he looks young, too young to be so shrunken and wasted, younger than when Jack last saw him. His orbitals are blistered and his lips parched, and his eyes look both too bright and too unfocused.  Jack remembers going to see Manet a month before he died, recalls the pallor and the eyes and the unnatural youth.  Morrie's odd repugnance in recent years acquires new contours: the loss of sensual interest, the superstitious vapours, all facets perhaps of who Morrie had always been, but also shaded by the illness that's been consuming him all along.  

 

"It's the French sickness," Morrie explains, unnecessarily.  "Makes a right sight of me, I'm sure.  Shan't be much longer, it seems."  One hand creeps over the coverlet towards him, and it takes Jack a moment to realize what he's asking for.  He takes the hand in both his own.  

 

"'Sgood to see yeh, Jack.  Niver changed a hair, I see.  Did yeh ever find yer doctor to tell yeh how it comes to be so?"  

 

"Never did," Jack says.  "Still looking for him, though."  

 

"Ah, aren't we all looking for the right doctor?  Trouble is, yeh're never going to find in him no surrrgery, Jack Harkness, nor no blue box save if it's the confessional.  What yeh need is a soul-doctor, not a saw-bones."  Morrie laughs a little, a dry scraping sound.  "And trust an Irishman to go argufying with the divil on his deathbed."   

 

"You know you've never won an argument with me in your life, Morrie," Jack says.  "You might just be right, though.  He's my soul-doctor if anyone is."    

 

"Ah, well, that's something," Morrie says.  "Better yeh have one than no."  He shifts a little, apparently in some pain.  

 

"Need anything?" Jack asks, glancing at the medicine bottles on the nightstand.  

 

"Naught that yeh can do for me, boyo.  Really, not much to be done.  Made me peace, just about.  Mostly it's Minnie I worry about.  Got the rheumatics bad, and there's not so many as trouble themselves about her. Yeh'd think a few would show a bit more grateful."  

 

Morrie's strange, abiding loyalty, his clinging to creed; no, Jack's in no position to judge.  He squeezes the hand he's cradling, and swallows, once, as Morrie hacks out a dry cough before continuing.  

 

"Still, she’ll have the shop when I go, and find another likely lad to run it, so.  That’s something.”  

 

“It is,” Jack agrees softly, and there doesn’t seem much more to say after that.  

 

That night, he goes on a three-week bender, turning a few light tricks on the side just to keep the coppers clinking in his pockets and the gin flowing at night.  He shoots his mouth off recklessly, for once, and provokes a satisfying if unfortunately fatal series of tavern brawls.  He revives one cold morning with a broken bottle in his stomach and two predatory feminine faces swimming into clarity as they slowly advance upon him.  
 

\--------  

VIII.  

It feels like several hours, but must only be about ten minutes later that he hears Ianto approach, bearing his striped mug and a fresh pile of requisition forms.  Jack takes them both and thanks him automatically, looking up only when Ianto says quietly, "Did you need anything else, sir?"  

 

A drink.  A shag.  All the retcon in the dispensary.  "I'm fine, thanks," he says, raising the mug to hide whatever Ianto sees in his face that's making him linger.

  
Ianto quirks an eyebrow in the way that Jack wishes he didn't find quite so appealing, and says softly, "Owen's a wanker, sir. I'm sure you know better than to pay much attention to what he says."  He pauses. "Also, for the record, neither of us is a habitual smoker.  It seemed...a morning for indulgence, that's all."  

 

And this is, abruptly, one of those moments when Jack realizes that he has no idea what or who he's dealing with here.   

 

And perhaps that too is a back-wash from his morning's reminiscence: the strange eddying of those first weeks in Cardiff, before Morrie, when he just battered along the channel unmoored; and all the half-purposeful wanderings until Torchwood, after.  He's probably staring much too intently, because Ianto visibly pulls back into himself.  "I'll be in the Archives if you require anything else, sir," he says, turning, and while Jack usually makes a point of savouring these exits, he's seeing too much and too little at the moment.    

 

Mercenary, con artist, whore: Doctor or no Doctor, he's never drifted far from those old, sea-weathered pilings.   

 

Or maybe he's stuck in the drag of the tide that always, always churns up the sand, leaving his hands gritty and empty.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _je t'en prie, pas ainsi!_ I beg you, not like that!
> 
> This concludes the story; an afterword with notes and links will appear shortly. Thanks for reading!


	7. Afterword

Torso of steel, shilling a feel. Any takers?  
\-- Jack to Alice and Emily, "Fragments"

  
You're going to need some way to earn.  
\-- Emily to Jack, "Fragments"

  
I used to date Marcel Proust. Boy, was he immature.  
\-- Jack to Owen, "Dead Man Walking"

 

According to canon, Jack spent _thirty years_ on Earth between his mistimed arrival in 1869 and joining Torchwood in 1899.  We don't have a lot of hints about what he was up to during that time.  He tells the Doctor in "Utopia" that he discovered he couldn't die on Ellis Island in 1892, but it's hard to imagine that he didn't at least have a clue before then (because whatever your genetics, you don't simply not age for that long, right?).  It's obviously a crucial period in his own evolution, if we compare the Jack of DW S1 to the Jack of "Fragments."  It's also a historical period that fascinates me in its own right, especially when it comes to class and sex. Jack seems almost tailor-made (so to speak) for a look at those aspects of that time.

I did a lot of research for this story, and there's very little in it that's invented out of whole cloth.  And while I hope that the story stands on its own, it does reference a number of places and historical figures that may not be familiar to everyone.  When I first published this story in 2009, I included a lot of links on Cardiff history, in the somewhat naive hope that other writers might find them useful (selfishness, purely: I love good historical TW stories and wanted to see more of them). That ship has probably sailed, but one may find, among other things, a map of the Bute Docks in 1886 at [ this site](http://www.british-history.ac.uk/mapsheet.aspx?sheetid=3621&compid=55186). As much as possible, I tried to stick to the actual geography of Cardiff as it evolved over the period of the story.

That includes the geography of prostitution. It is, after all, canon backstory for Jack (see quotes above). The suggestion in "Fragments" that Jack was selling sex intrigued me: first, I think it would take pretty extreme circumstances for Jack to stop giving it away, and second, it's presented with such ambiguity; I believe that the writers intended "shilling a feel" as a measure of Jack's degradation. But it's far from clear that Jack would see whoring with the same stigma; his tone is certainly one of cheerful shamelessness.  Indeed, the same ep gives us every reason to think that he finds his work for Torchwood more demeaning, at least early on.

I invented Morrie as a minor character in an earlier fic, [The Tale of the Cobbler and the Tailor's Son](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1007244). The late and much-missed andreth47 was one of the betas for that story, and she pointed me to a series of images [here](http://walnet.org/csis/biblios/monty_glover/).  They are a good forty to fifty years after the period I was writing about, but they got me to delve into Victorian male prostitution.  I think that Morrie started out in my mind being more Oscar Wilde's brand of rentboy, or one of the "roughs" in these images, but in the boom days of Cardiff's coal economy, he is far more likely to have been a transvestite.  Coal ships often loaded and unloaded very quickly, and the trade in dockside prostitution probably emphasized speedy trysts and the "mouth music" that was Morrie's specialty.

Sophia Gardens in Cardiff retains its reputation as a cruising spot to this day, but I was delighted to discover mentions of "public indecencies" there in criminal hearings for the 1880s. Where better for Jack to meet a spare Blowfish and encounter Torchwood for the first time? (My headcanon, incidentally, is that this is where Jack and Ianto had their first encounter in _Fragments_ , a theme I explored in another fic, [Hunting Song ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1005524).)

As for social class: we tend to think of Jack as someone who could charm his way in or out of anything, but in both Victorian England and Third Republican France, nobody would have mistaken him for a gentleman or trusted him beyond the constraints of class etiquette. Those barriers were very real.  But both his physical type and demeanor would have appealed to the artistic avant-garde of the day -- the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England (with John Ruskin their champion and mentor) and the Impressionists in Paris. Edouard Manet (who actually did die of syphilis) in particular was interested in the intersection of the rebuilt Paris with class and sex boundaries, and he often painted bohemian or lower-class male figures in equivocal erotic situations (see, for example, [Chez le père Lathuille](http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~kharty/images/Artists/Manet/Chez%20le%20pere%20Lathuille.jpg) ).

I felt compelled to include John Ruskin because he transformed 19th-century thought about culture, society and history; also, he knew simply everybody and introduced most of them to each other -- "Six Degrees of Ruskin" will pretty much touch all corners of Victorian England as well as parts beyond. He's famous, among other things, for quite possibly never having consummated his marriage with his wife Effie, who eventually ran off with his protegé John Millais -- another painter who would have appreciated Jack's type. Ruskin had an especially profound influence on two other writers mentioned here: Oscar Wilde, who would have delighted in sharpening his wits on Jack, and Marcel Proust, whom Jack tells Owen he'd dated (thanks to copperbadge for tracking that reference down for me). That's as odd a couple as I have ever imagined, but extremely fun to write. I have obviously cribbed from Proust's "Swann's Way" in the opening section.

I felt certain that the TARDIS library would include "Voyage to the Moon" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," so I couldn't possibly leave out Jules Verne. Jack might well have preferred his company to Marcel's; my headcanon is that they did a fair amount of sailing together in Verne's sea-going yacht. An AU I'm afraid I'll never get around to writing.

Finally, I always wondered why Jack went to America in 1892 in the first place. If he was still stalking the TARDIS, what might have taken the Doctor there at that time? Could it have been America's most ambitious mass-culture project to that date?

[The World's Columbian Exposition, 1893](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_Columbian_Exposition)

The Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, a.k.a. the White City, inspired the City Beautiful movement (and the completion of the Washington Mall, among other city centers), introduced the Pledge of Allegiance, gave women a pavilion of their own built by a woman, and brought the first Ferris Wheel to completion. It was part carnival sideshow (aptly named in how it divided "whites" from "others"), part jingoistic triumph, and part urban poem. The Doctor is more than a bit my Mary Sue in how he describes it, but I'm convinced it would have both fascinated and repelled him.

I always wanted to write a historical novel. I'm glad that Jack gave me the chance, and hope that you've enjoyed coming along for the ride.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the lack of embedded images here; I could not transfer those I used in the original endnotes for the story.


End file.
